Ok, please let me know if this get's boring , but here are a couple more shots I took this weekend that I wanted to share.

These were taken at a small beach town called Pearly Beach about 2hrs from Cape Town, South Africa. A friend of mine has a house there.

My favourite time of the day on this beach is before 10am as the area has quite amazing light. There are some very interesting, quite intense colours to capture in the morning (although my pics don't do it justice).

While thinking about B&W photography the night before, I decided to set Mono in-camera for a couple shots. I enjoyed how I began to 'see' differently and regard subject matter & compose differently also.

Hi Gordon,
No filters applied. I did check how they looked with the different filter options, but decided to leave it.

After looking at these pics, are there any post-processing suggestions you could make?

I find post-processing quite a challanging aspects of digital photography at the moment. There are a few things I know I need to do to make life easier for me:

1. stop using my bad laptop screen and buy a good stand-alone display for true colours.
2. get it properly calibrated (still need to learn about this).
3. get more advise of how to evaluate and modify pics where needed

When converting to black and white, there's lots of tricks you can do to simulate the use of coloured filters - these can turn blue skies or green leaves very dark for a more dramtic effect...

If you have Photoshop and a colour photo, try this technicque...

Black and white photographers employ coloured filters to generate more dramatic results – a red filter for example will darken a blue sky. It’s quite possible to emulate this effect digitally in Photoshop using two Adjustment Layers. Create a Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer, select Colour as its mode, then click OK. Now create a second Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer on top of the first and reduce its saturation to -100. This will turn the image into plain greyscale.

The clever part is that the middle Adjustment Layer can now be used to simulate almost any kind of coloured filter. Simply double-click the adjustment icon of the middle layer in the Layers palette to bring up the usual Hue / Saturation controls. Now just drag the Hue slider back and forth to simulate the effect of different coloured filters.

Hi Roland
Your
I was just wondering whether you managed any slower shots during your beach outing ? Any tips since the wind element is pretty much a deciding factor. I tried a few long exposure pics and the results very horrible - since the wind was 'against' me taking anything slower than 1/100.